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Neil PostmanCollection of essays on different topics from education, childhood, politics, technology, television etc. Postman, as always, provides insights into our culture (mostly American) and suggests some practical ideas how to prevent negative ongoing trends. As always he uses wisdom of sages, thinkers, writers, and philosophers from the past to help us understand current social issues.
His essays and observations draw a picture of quite sad future. A lot of this predications are already fulfilled, so Postman is unfortunately was very accurate in them which he poses as warnings for us.
However, what I liked about this book is that he tries to stay optimistic. He reminds us that civilized society is very vulnerable and we should pay attention to dangers. And he tries to provide us with a mindset how to do just that.
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In 1986, soon after the book was published and had started to make ripples, Dad was on ABC’s Nightline, discussing with Ted Koppel the effect TV can have on society if we let it control us, rather than vice versa. As I recall, at one juncture, to illustrate his point that our brief attention span and our appetite for feel-good content can short-circuit any meaningful discourse, Dad said, “For example, Ted, we’re having an important discussion about the culture but in thirty seconds we’ll have to break for a commercial to sell cars or toothpaste.” Mr. Koppel, one of the rare serious figures on network television, smiled wryly—or was it fatigue? “Actually, Dr. Postman,” he said, “it’s more like ten seconds.”
Andrew Postman -
As I suggested earlier, it is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today’s world. The shape of a man’s body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech. For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.
Neil Postman -
To use the term “distance learning” to refer to students and teacher sending e-mail messages to each other may have some value, but it obscures the fact that the act of reading a books is the best example of distance learning possible, for reading not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence bit of time as well.
Neil Postman -
The brain does not regard brain change as a problem. If we think of language as brain of civilization, then it is possible that severe language-damage may not be perceived by the social body as a problem. It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial. In adapting ourselves, we come to accept the present situation as the only available standard.
Neil Postman -
As language itself creates culture in its own image, each new medium of communication re-creates or modifies culture in its image; and it is extreme naïveté to believe that a medium of communication or, indeed, any technology is merely a tool, a way of doing. Each is also a way of seeing. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence; to a man with a television camera, everything looks like a picture, and to a man with a computer, the whole world looks like a data.
Neil Postman